Kustodiev's Art World

In the World of Art artistic league, which contained the entire glory that was St. Petersburg’s Silver Age and a portion of the seasons of Diaghilev, he stood apart. Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev (1878-1927) had his own World of Art, far from the Versailles of the Sun King or the Peterhof of Elizabeth’s time. It was a Volga thing, a devil may care, reckless thing, full of sun and music, with fairs and farces, troikas, traktirs and banyas, samovars from Tula and trays from Zhostov, fashionable merchant’s wifes and their dashing husbands. It was motley as lubok, and as subtle as a Flemish painting.

This world was not contained by his canvasses, but splashed over beyond the frames of his paintings, into his life, his studio, with its collection of wooden toys and Russian songs performed by Shalyapin. Kustodiev’s Petersburg home on the Petrograd Side (Vvedenskaya ulitsa 7) was, for more than 10 years before and after the revolution, a true artistic salon, where art people met, discussed their latest works, held concerts and literary readings. All of the World of Art people gathered there —Dobuzhinsky, Bilibin, Somov, Petrov-Vodkin, Benois and Vereysky were all guests. Poets and writers—Alexander Blok, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Alexey Tolstoy— called at Kustodiev’s. The apartment has memories of Yershov’s voice, whose portrait in the role of Siegfried, painted with Kustodiev’s brush, still hangs in the Mariinsky Theater. And Shalyapin’s, whose most famous portrait was painted there. And in the 1920s, a certain promising young musician named Dmitry Shostakovich often played for the Kustodievs on their luxurious Blutner piano. So it is that Kustodiev’s paintings and drawings contained nearly all of the remarkable Petersburgians of the era surrounding 1917.

Yet the artist’s favorite models were always his wife and two children, and his numerous pets, who hung about in the studio during working hours. The artist’s daughter recalled: “Our house was always full of animals. Cats and their kittens lived in a box that was in papa’s studio, and he would pet them and play with them for hours, hold them in his arms, or put them under his coat. Once, the writer Samuil Marshak came to visit on some publishing business. Suddenly, at the height of the discussions, four fluffy heads peeked out from under papa’s coat. The kittens had woken up and were looking out. Marshak was touched by this for a long time.”

To tell the truth, Kustodiev’s wife, Yulia Yevstafyevna, had a shapely figure and fine, aristocratic features, but this was not quite the artist’s ideal of Russian female beauty. Yet his daughter, the future actress, willingly posed for him from when she was a child. And, in later years, full-figured with a healthy appetite, she became his favorite model. Benois joked in this regard: “It is as if Irina knew, and sought while growing up, to become exactly the model that Boris Mikhailovich needed.”

It is certainly no accident that all of the artist’s descendants in one way or another cast their lot with art. His son, Kirill Borisovich, a theaterartist, managed the decorative art section of the Pushkin Theater (formerly Aleksandrinsky). His daughter, Irina Borisovna, the actress, performed in concerts in the regional philharmonic. His granddaughter, Tatyana Kirillovna Kustodiev, became an art historian and has worked her entire life in the Hermitage, with responsibility for some of the museum’s most valuable possessions—the collection of Italian paintings.

The Kustodievs had an entire program for the aesthetic education of their children. Irina Borisovna wrote, “With infinite tenderness, I recall what a wonderful childhood our parents gave us. From our earliest years, they took us to museums, taught us to see the beauty in nature, to distinguish colors, to listen to music.” If it was the ballet, then “The Humpbacked Horse” with Karsavina and Nizhinsky. If the opera, then “Life for the Tsar,” with Shalyapin. And trips abroad: “The Last Supper” in Milan, the Sistine Madonna in Dresden. And reading aloud, and domestic plays and masquerades ...

The artistic atmosphere filled the Kustodiev’s home life. Tatyana Kirillovna lived in the apartment on Vvedenskaya during her pre-WWII childhood and recalled how this atmosphere was diligently preserved by her grandmother Yulia Yevstafyevna, Boris Mikhailovich’s widow:

“A rather strict taste reigned in this household. The entire apartment was decorated with grandfather’s things and those of his friends in the World of Art. They were the works of Benois, of Bilibin and Somov ... Style a la russe, which was in fashion at the beginning of the 20th century, absolutely did not take root. Yet father did love folk art, and so there were all kinds of carved toys in the house. In fact, in Benois’ Alphabet book, published in 1904, under the letter “I” for igrushka (toy) there is, among the others, a drawing of a Nutcracker, which to this day lives in our house, preserved from this huge collection.”

Kustodiev’s friend and first biographer, Vsevolod Voinov, called him “the artist of light and triumph.” But few know that light and triumph were infrequent visitors to everyday life of the apartment on Vvedenskaya ulitsa. After several difficult operations, the 38-year-old artist, suffering from a then incurable spinal disease, was confined to a wheelchair. His light, triumphal art was created in spite of life circumstances and thanks to the selfless assistance of family. Tatyana Kirillovna tells this of her grandmother, Yulia Yevstafyevna:

“A cult of grampa ruled at home, and this was not by accident. Grandma adored him, and was for the entirety of his all too short life (grampa died at 49) his friend, helper, nurse, and the person who urged him to work in his times of despair (and grandpa was severely sick — near the end, not only his legs stopped working, but also his arms, and it was, in general, very, very difficult to work). Yulia Yevstafyevna was a remarkable and courageous person, and Russian art owes her a great debt, as does the art of Boris Mikhailovich.”

In reality, Kustodiev discovered “his style” and “his theme” fairly late, when he was already overcome with insufferable pain. Were it not for his family, we would perhaps only know him as a talented portraitist.

The “true,” “classic” Kustodiev of fairs and maslenitsas emerged gradually. That world that was familiar to him as a Volgan, born among Astrakhan’s wealthy, did not suddenly appear in his paintings.

Graduating from seminary in Astrakhan, Kustodiev arrived in St. Petersburg to enter the Academy of the Arts. He found himself in the class of Ilya Repin, at that time the most “progressive” teacher. He showed himself to be a capable portraitist, such that, in 1903, his master did him the honor of inviting him to assist on his famous work, “Ceremonial Session of the State Council.” He spent his vacations “in nature”: he went home, to the Volga, to the Crimea, to the Caucasus, to Moscow—to visit tent-roofed churches, bazaars and fairs. He took photographs and did studies of peasant men and women. In the village of Semyonovskoye, near Kineshma, he found the theme for his diploma work: “Today there was a bazaar here, exactly what I came here for, yes, such a bazaar, that I stood, dazed, and gazed about, wishing to have the superhuman ability to commit all this to memory, to remember it all and to express it. I was positively dazzled. There was so much of interest, that I could not describe it in several years! If I could just recreate one hundredth of what was there, it would be amazing!”

In 1903, Kustodiev graduated from the Academy with a gold medal, for his painting “Village Bazaar.” The “bazaar” theme, however, was temporarily put on the back burner: the graduate was assaulted from all sides for portrait work. Even the emperor paid him attention. He made his portraits into sculptures, which he had taken a great interest in during his student years. He went abroad, admired the great Italians, was enthused by the new French paintings: “Impressionism is all sun, joy, movement ... From dark, dusty studios, they brought their paintings out into nature, into the world, and began to paint the sun from the living sun — they filled their paintings with light and joy.”

He became famous, such that, in 1912, the Uffizi gallery ordered from him a self-portrait. Yet he had not forgotten the theme of his diploma work. “Village Bazaar” began to show its influence through the exhibitions of the World of Art. Alexander Benois wrote: “It seems to me that the real Kustodiev is the Russian fair, multi-colored, with large print fabrics, barbarous battles between colors, the Russian land and the Russian village, with its harmonicas, gingerbread, boldly dressed girls and jaunty young fellows.”

In 1916, after another operation, Kustodiev was confined to a wheelchair, secluded in his studio: “Since my world now is only my room, it is so melancholy — without light and the sun. So I try to put this sun into my paintings, if only to capture and convey a reflection of it.” The artist’s fantastic visual memory came to the fore here, that hoped-for “superhuman ability to commit to memory,” which he wrote about when observing the bazaar in Semyonovskoye. The more persistently the pain rolled over him, the brighter became Kustodiev’s art world: the idyllic view of merchant Rus’ was woven from childhood memories and impressions from home.

It was a fantastic, gingerbread world. It had a special ethnography: haymaking time and outdoor parties transformed into one long holiday, with suits that are always dressy, sable furs, Pavlovsk-Posad scarves and Rostov enamel. The anthropological archetype was marked by a healthy, rosy-cheeked, plump-faced portliness. It had a special geography: Astrakhan, Kostroma, Kineshma, Moscow, Petersburg — all basically mixed together.

And above the village fairs, above the trading rows and sledges, above the village women, bathing by the stream, proudly rose the bell towers of Vvedenskaya church — which was visible from the windows of his studio.

A naturally gifted storyteller, Kustodiev composed beautiful sagas about the luxurious life of merchant Russia, which no longer existed, or which maybe never existed at all. In cold and hungry Petrograd of 1923, there appeared an elegant little book called Rus’: The Russian Types of B.M. Kustodiev, text by Yevgeny Zamyatin. The “text” by Zamyatin had nothing to do with the water colors, done to the order of the future leading light of Socialist Realism, Isaak Brodsky. Instead, Zamyatin’s “text” was about an invented patriarchal Volga town called Kustodiev, with its fairs, churches, traktirs and banyas, with its merchants, their wives and lovers, where tragicomic dramas played out before Kustodievan scenery.

Kustodiev worked a great deal in the theater. As a young man, he was an assistant to Alexander Golovin in the Mariinsky’s decorative workshops. Later, he designed for several productions of Ostrovsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Leskov, including in the famous Moscow Art Theater (MKhAT). So it is perhaps no accident that all of his “Maslenitsas” and “Holidays” seem like one huge theatrical backdrop.

Kustodiev’s city was visible from the old building on Vvedenskaya ulitsa — through the prism of the paintings of the old masters. In the Academy, in the Hermitage, in his foreign travels, he scooped up the artistic culture peculiar to all in the World of Art movement, and then carefully hid it under a mask of populist works. But it was in vain. For festive “Maslenitsas” unfolded into Bruegelian perspectives—with a view from above, somehow dismissive and sad. The well-fed, ruddy “Beauties” seemed like great-granddaughters of Rubens’ bacchanals. The sedate “Merchant Women” acted like the stately infants of Velasquez. The tea-drinking draymen in “Moscow Traktir” became the solemn participants in “The Last Supper.”

He spoke respectfully with the old masters, but with an amazing simplicity. Who else could so unceremoniously translate the allegories of the ages from French into Nizhny Novgorodan, in “The Blue House”: someone drives off pigeons, someone flirts with a gentleman admirer, someone drinks tea on the balcony, someone rocks a baby to sleep, and someone orders a coffin.

A year before his death, after what turned out to be his final visit to the Hermitage, Kustodiev admitted: “It is as if I have drunk a strong, spicy wine, which lifts me above all the mundaneness of our everyday life; I want to work so much, so much, if only so that one of the paintings from my life might at least hang in the lobby of the leading museum of the Old Masters.”

Kustodiev was quite enthusiastic about the revolution. As early as the 1905 revolution, he drew caricatures of the government for the leftist satirical magazines Zhupel and Adskaya Pochta. Thus, his axiomatic “Bolshevik” of 1920, with its gigantic standard-bearer in tarpaulin boots and quilted jacket, striding between buildings at the head of a multitudinous demonstration, was a natural consequence of his political beliefs and of the development of the theme of a national holiday.

After the revolution, new prospects for work appeared, for example in book illustration. The Soviet state was gripped with an enthusiasm for publishing—the People’s Committee for Education came with orders for the State Publishing House. The Russian classics—Pushkin, Nekrasov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Tolstoy, Gorky — were printed on cheap paper with foul-smelling inks and weak bindings, but with fine, simple graphics that proceeded from the aesthetics of the World of Art. Everything that was accumulated under the old regime was used. Merchant family life for Ostrovsky, Volga landscapes for Turgenev and Leskov. And, of course, the world of children, full of toys and animals, was equally suitable for the magical tales of old and for the tales of Marshak and the new children’s literature, like the books “Children on Lenin,” or “A Real Pioneer.”

The illness progressed: his wife massaged his numb
hands for hours every day, otherwise it would have been impossible for him to even hold his brushes. The intolerable pain tormented him, but Kustodiev continued to work and even mastered a new lithographic technique. His brother, an engineer, constructed a special table for him, which was fastened to his wheelchair, and a deskstand on which it was possible to work while he lay in bed. His daughter recalled how the monumental portrait of Shalyapin was created:

“The power of talent, the desire to create was stronger than the physical incapacitation. He created this ingenious portrait, known throughout the world, under conditions of inhuman suffering. His friends attached some kind of a device to the ceiling, with a rope to tilt the canvas above him, like a suspended ceiling. Visitors and those of his household strove with all their energy to brighten the patient’s everyday life. They even took him to the suburbs in a car his brother had built, to give him impressions of the open air.

The World of Art disappeared. His old friends— Bilibin, Dobuzhinsky, Benois—emigrated. Kustodiev did not even think about leaving Russia, resolving to live and work as far as he was able for the good of his new country. Optimism did not leave him: he thought of illustrating books and theatrical performances. The author of the pathetic-celebratory “Bolshevik” could well have become the ideal artist of the Socialist Realist era. Yet he really did not think about ideology and, in 1926, apparently understanding that the end was near, wrote: “I do not know whether I have succeeded in doing and expressing in my work what I wanted — a love of life, joy and vivacity, a love for what is mine, for things ‘Russian’ — it was always the singular ‘subject’ of my paintings.”

The artist died in 1927, just as severe times were closing in. The new regime, which had cooled to Kustodiev, the “painter of merchants,” forgot about him for more than 30 years, remembering again only on the eve of the Khrushchev Thaw. The fate of his works was sad. As his granddaughter, Tatyana Kirillovna, said:

The government gave permission for our family to live in a separate apartment that was quite large for that time. Grandfather’s paintings hung on the walls, sketches lay in folders ... It all ended rather sorrowfully, because we did not leave during the blockade, even though my father worked in the Pushkin Theater, which was evacuated to Novosibirsk at the start of the war. Grandmother did not want to abandon the apartment, to leave behind grandfather’s works ... We left only after her death (in March 1942, in the last cars that made it across the melting ice of Lake Ladoga) and certain things were rolled up (as you shouldn’t do with paintings) and taken with us. During the bombing at some station or other, we were robbed — all the paintings were stolen. And when, after the war, they began to emerge in museums (in particular, one of the portraits of father, in an eastern, Central Asian outfit with a copy of the journal World of Art in his hands, turned up in Minsk), father said: ‘Well, in a museum — thank God.’ We somehow preserved a few things totally serendipitously. In general, however, very little remains ...

Yet, even after the war, the family, which had to leave the hospitable apartment on Vvedenskaya, was able to save a few lovely relics connected with Kustodiev’s artworks. Among the most charming of children’s portraits in the Russian Museum is Kustodiev’s “Children in Fancy Dress,” in which Kirill and Irina are dressed as marquises. In her childhood, Tatyana Kirillovna was “personally” familiar with these elegant outfits: “Auntie is painted in a dress with farthingales ... this fancy dress outfit survived. But instead of treating this outfit as something of historical value, they sewed me a dress out of the farthingales in the postwar years, insofar as there was absolutely nothing else to wear. So, after the war, I had such a chintz dress. Of course, the chintz was of the highest quality, because the dress was resewn several times and worn for a long time ...”

Kustodiev’s works have now dispersed throughout the world. They are in the most important museums of the former USSR and in some galleries in Europe. They are held in private collections in Russia and abroad. A large number settled in Petersburg, in the Russian Museum, in the apartment museum of Isaak Brodsky, and in the Theatrical Museum. The Tretyakov Gallery can boast of masterpieces like “Moscow Traktir,” and both “Beauties” and “Bolshevik.” A large collection can be found in the Astrakhan gallery named for the artist, in the Kustodiev Museum in the village of Ostrovskyoye, and also in Saratov, Kostroma, Yaroslavl, Omsk, Minsk, Bishkek and other cities. These many items will be collected together for a huge retrospective exhibition which opens in December at the Russian Museum, in connection with the 125th anniversary of Kustodiev’s birth.   RL

Russian Life expresses special gratitude to Tatyana Kirillovna Kustodiev for providing material for this article. The article used fragments of letters and recollections published in the books: Letters. Articles. Recollections. B. M. Kustodiev, Leningrad, 1967; News of Kustodiev, S. G. Kaplanova, Moscow, 1979.